Mick Moloney
was born in Limerick, Ireland, but makes his home in the U.S. As on 1995's Out of Ireland, his subject is the
Irish in America, specifically how generations of desperate immigrants
took ship, made landfall, struggled for their livelihoods, and, finally,
achieved economic and social parity. He is a convincing storyteller,
inhabiting the lives of railroad laborers, sailors, Civil War volunteers,
and separated lovers. Backup singers Beverley Smith and Saul Broudy
perform with rare empathy and grace. Fiddler Eileen Ivers, late of
Riverdance, is rich toned and idiomatic, but Bruce Molsky and Marie
Reilly are also remarkably fine players. Standouts include an affecting
version of "Skibereen," a famine-era dirge describing the deliberate,
relentless starvation of an entire village. And on "Sweet King
Williamstown," a lad from steerage survives the sinking of the Titanic
only to meet his fate during World War I

“Far
From the Shamrock Shore” A CD by Mike Moloney

[Mike has written the
following histories of each song. They are included with the CD.There are seventeen titles.]

This song was
written in 1843 by Dan Emmet (1815-1904), one of the most famous Irish
American performers in minstrelsy.More likely than
not, he adapted it from a popular older African American song which was
sung near his home in Mount Vernon, Ohio in the 1830s by African
American river boatmen on the Ohio River.Emmet,
whose grandfather John had emigrated from Ireland before the
Revolutionary War and served as a surgeon and chaplain in Washington's
army, was an outstanding singer and banjo and fiddle player who formed
the Virginia Minstrels with Frank Brower, Dick Pelham and Billy Whitlock
in the early 1840s and toured Britain and Ireland in the summer of 1843.In this tour, Emmet introduced the 5-string banjo formally to
Ireland
for the first time along with fellow Irish American Joel Walker
Sweeney, the most famous banjo player of the day, who guested with the
group for the tour."The Boatman's Dance" was
one of the staples of their repertoire featuring a classic song and
dance minstrel routine-all the Virginia
minstrels were accomplished dancers whose style was drawn from an
amalgam of African, English and Irish influences.
Emmet is best known today as the author of "Dixie" which he wrote (or
again more probably adapted from African American antecedents) on a
rainy day in New York City in 1859 when he was a celebrated member of
Bryant's Minstrels, one of the most prominent New York troupes of the
era.It was originally designed to be a minstrel
walk-around, closing out the show with all members of the cast on stage,
but he watched astonished as it became the anthem of the Confederacy
during the Civil War.

This is one of
the most poignant songs about the Irish who died in the American Civil
War.The Irish Brigade was commanded by Brigadier
General Thomas Francis Meagher, who was born into a wealthy merchant
family in CountyWaterford
which had made its fortune by financing and exploiting the 18th century
Irish cod fisheries in Newfoundland.
Meagher, an ardent Nationalist, had fought in the short lived 1848
rebellion.He was captured along with fellow
revolutionary, John Mitchell, tried and sentenced to death, but this
sentence was commuted to exile in far-off Tasmania.He escaped and made his way to New York
where he became a successful lawyer.When the war
broke out, he enlisted in the Union Army where he became a captain in
the 69th Regiment and fought in the first battle of the war in Bull Run.
After the 69th Regiment was decimated at the Battle of Fredericksburg,
many Irish soldiers continued to fight under an Irish banner.Meagher was appointed as one of eight Irish-born generals in the
Union Army and helped organize and then lead The Irish Brigade which
included many veterans from the 69th.The Irish
Brigade was to become indelibly associated with the heroism of the Irish
in the Civil War.Thousands of Brigade soldiers
fought and died in major battles, including Antietam
and Gettysburg.
Through their heroic sacrifice, they helped quell anti-Irish sentiment
in America
and paved the path of acceptance for their own families and for future
generations of Irish immigrants to the United States
in the years to come. The bravery of the young Irish
soldiers was celebrated in hundreds of songs penned during and after the
war by writers who found a ready outlet for them on the variety stage.
Many of the songs such as "Pat Murphy of the Irish Brigade" expressed
the hope that the sacrifice of these brave young Irishmen would not be
forgotten while their countrymen back in the homeland still struggled
for their freedom.Versions of the song can be found
in John Wright's Irish Immigrant Sons and Ballads (University of Bowling
Green, 1973).

The late Joe
Heaney used to call this "the granddaddy of all the emigration songs."
In the four years from 1845-49, a million and a half men, women and
children died in the Great Irish Famine.Another
million left Ireland
for America.They either sailed directly from Ireland
or walked from towns emptied by starvation, typhus, and dysentery to
sail to Liverpool
and board "coffin ships" on which thousands more would die before ever
seeing North America.
When the famine struck, Ireland's
native population of eight million (nearly four million more than live
in the country today) was poverty-stricken and crowded onto scattered
land holdings. Most of the native Irish could only afford to rent tiny
parcels of poor quality land from their wealthier countrymen, while
descendants of Protestant British settlers owned Ireland's most fertile
acreage-granted to them during the 16th and 17th century British
occupation.As a result, a typical Irish tenant
farmer was barely able to feed a family of up to ten children from
potatoes grown on less than one acre of poor land while wealthy
descendants from British settlers, like Lord Cunningham in Donegal or
his neighbor Lord Leitrim, grazed livestock for profit on their 100,000
acre farms.When a fungus new to Europe
arrived in Ireland
in 1845 and killed the potatoes for four consecutive years, the majority
of the population faced starvation or death by the diseases that quickly
spread through the densely crowded tiny houses on the small tenant
farms.Most disturbing of all is the fact that a
combination of indifference, incompetence, prejudice and greed helped
ensure that the famine victims did not receive the kind of assistance
that would have been extended to mainland British citizens. Food that
could have been used to save lives in Ireland
contributed to increased prosperity among wealthy absentee landlords in
Britain.As people lay dying all over Britain's
closest colony, livestock and grain were being exported to England
daily to pay rents and taxes. Consequently, many Irish would prefer to
this day to call the catastrophe of those times "The Great Irish Hunger"
or "The Great Irish Starvation" rather than the Irish Famine.Many of those who arrived safely on American shores would work
and save to send passage money for other family members still in Ireland.All the while they would be hoping that those left behind would
not end up among the countless thousands buried in mass graves.Graves like the ones in the grounds of Abbeysrewry Churchyard
near the picturesque town of Skibereen.
This town in West Cork
was the gateway to the starkly beautiful Mizen peninsula where over 80
per cent of the people perished in the famine.The
name "Skibereen" became almost synonymous with the Irish famine mostly
due to the many stories that appeared in the London Illustrated News
about the horrors seen by reporters in the area.The
song, which was written decades after the famine, is set in America
where a young boy asks his father why is left his native land.

I first heard
this highly partisan American Civil War song sung by New York
singers David Kincaid and Dan Milner. It was
written in 1861 by Joe English, a well-known New York
songwriter and performer, to the tune of the popular Irish song "The
Irish Jaunting Car."The patriotism of the Irish
volunteer is established early on in the song where his family history
is traced to the battle of 1798, a campaign which saw the harp and
shamrock become the official symbols of the United Irishman who fought
heroically for the cause of Irish freedom and the rights of man.
At the onset of the Civil War, the Irish volunteer
eagerly enlists in the 69th Regiment to show his loyalty to the new
republic that he now calls home. The 69th New York Volunteers was known
by Irish and non-Irish alike as the Gallant 69th.It
was headed by Colonel Michael Corcoran who endeared himself to Irish
people everywhere by refusing to parade the 69th Militia for the visit
of the Prince of Wales to New York City
in the fall of 1860, an action for which he subsequently faced court
martial.The 69th Regiment suffered heavy losses at
the Battle of Bull Run and was almost completely wiped out at the Battle
of Fredericksburg.Also mentioned in the song are
Thomas Francis Meagher and Colonel Thomas Nugent, both members of the
69th Regiment, whose office battle flags were the Harp of Erin and the
Stars and Stripes. Most of the regiment soldiers followed these flags
into battle wearing a sprig of green in their caps.

This version is
collated from a few different versions I came across in a number of late
19th and early 20th century American songsters and broadsides in the
late Kenny Goldstein's matchless collection. The song was widely sung in
the Southern and Eastern United States
and was a particular favorite in the logging camps of Maine,
Massachusetts
and upstate New York.
The tune I learned from the sing-ing of Appalachian style singer, Hedy
West, whose haunting voice and stark 5-string banjo captivated me when I
first heard her perform in England
in the late 1960s.The song is classic "aisling," a
genre of song writing popular with Ireland's
poets from the 17th century onwards in which Mother Ireland is
represented allegorically in the form of a woman in bondage to English
power.She appears to a young man in a dream,
captivates him and asks for assistance.She
identifies herself in this song unambiguously as the "daughter of Daniel
O'Connell" - the legendary early 19th century Irish political activist.She speaks through the dream of the dangers she faces and of her
mission to rally her oppressed brethren who "slumber on Erin's
GreenShore."He awakens sadly to find she has gone but he knows that her
memory and her message will linger with him forever.

Song
#6Green Grows the Laurel

I heard this
version of the well-known 19th century love song sung by the great
Antrim singer Len Graham who in turn learned it from legendary CountyFermanagh
flute player and singer Cathal McConnell.It was
carried to America
probably by immigrants from the North of Ireland in the early nineteenth
century.Versions have turned up in various parts of
the southern Appalachian mountains and also much farther a field in the
far west where a variant of the song, "Green Grows the Lilacs," was
recorded by Tex Ritter.It is reputed to have been
widely sung by Irish soldiers who served in the U.S. Army in the Mexican
American War between 1846 and 1848 and the song was so catchy that it
appears to have become quickly part of the army repertoire. Indeed one
of the many theories of origin of the term "gringo" is that so many
Mexicans heard so many Anglo-Celtic soldiers singing the refrain that
they assumed it was kind of important identity marker. None of my
friends and colleagues who claim to be experts in Mexican American
history can prove that this is not true!

Song #7You Lovers All

I first heard
this sung by the mighty Frank Harte.The song is
set in the context of post famine emigration from Ireland
to North America.
Versions from various broadsides are published in John Wright's Irish
Emigrant Songs and Ballads. By this time land inheritance patterns had
changed dramatically from pre-famine arrangements where the land was
divided equally among all members of rural families. This
led to tiny and often dispersed land holdings with attendant poverty,
but at least everyone had a potential stake in the society and could
marry and raise a family. Post-famine land reforms ordained a new
situation where land was now inherited by just one son who often
received claim to the land late in life when his parents either died or
reluctantly passed it on.Generally he would then
enter into an arranged marriage.His new and often
much younger wife would come into his landholding with a dowry furnished
by her parents and she would become the new woman of the house.If a young woman did not have a dowry in post-famine rural Ireland
her chances of marriage were slim. Typically, in large families which
were poor, only one or two daughters could be furnished with dowries.There were very few employment opportunities outside the home for
unmarried women; so accordingly, huge numbers were forced to emigrate.For a time, more Irish women than men emigrated to America,
making the Irish case unique. During the 19th century in parts of rural
Ireland
it was rare for a person to marry outside of their class.However, hundreds of songs in the 19th century
followed the tradition about lovers eloping. These attest to the fact
that many simply broke the rules and took matters into their own hands.
I love the part in the song where the woman pursuing her true love to
North America
finds him in the first pub she enters after disembarking. The ultimate definition of a happy ending!

Song #8When the Breaker Starts Up Full Time

This was one of
the most popular songs from the Eastern Pennsylvania
anthracite coal mining region in the 1870s. The song was written by the
legendary Con Carbon, one of the most prolific songwriters in the
coalfields. It is still sung to this day by performers in the area
including the colorful ballad group, The Molly Maguires. Named after the
enigmatic secret Irish society whose members included some of the early
pioneers of labor organizing in the Eastern United States,
the group is quite popular.I learned this version
from their singing.Most of the mine laborers were
Irish emigrants, the majority of them from CountyDonegal.They held the hardest and poorest paid jobs from the moment they
arrived.Long workdays, dangerous conditions, and
law wages were just a few of the many injustices heaped upon the
laborers by the mining companies. The miners were routinely shortchanged
for their work and docked wages for such things as the use of necessary
mining equipment and impurities in the coal they sent up from below.
They were also charged exorbitant sums for basic necessities from the
town's company-owned store. Coal for house heating and basic children’s
education were often "luxuries" priced beyond a miner's budget. With
these oppressive practices, the mining companies kept the flimsy
shanties of their company-built towns filled with indebted miners."When the Breaker Starts up Full Time" is full of irony; the
implicit assumption of the song being that the breaker, which processed
the raw coal, will never, in fact, "start up full time," thus keeping
the miners in permanent poverty. There is an
oblique reference in the final verse to the tensions between the Irish
and the Austrian-Hungarian miners who were prepared to work for lower
pay. This was one of the many areas of
inter-ethnic tension between the Irish and other immigrants of differing
nationalities, including the Welsh and Cornish miners who arrived as
experienced mine workers from the old country and enjoy far higher wages
and much better living conditions.

Song #9 No Irish Need Apply

This song was
written by the famous New York
songwriter, John Poole, a native of Dublin
who also wrote the stage Irish classic, "Tim Finnegan's Wake." It was
made famous on the American vaudeville stage by Italian American, Tony
Pastor, who sang it night after night in his own theater in Manhattan,
dressed up imposingly in black tails and tall hat.
It was hugely popular with Irish audiences who had seen No Irish Need
Apply signs posted with regularity outside places of employment
particularly in east coast urban America.Prejudice was one of the hardships these new arrivals had hoped
they were leaving behind.Not until they arrived on
a distant shore did many Irish realize they would be faced with this
formidable challenge. This was in addition to making a new life in a
strange country.Making things worse was that many
influential Americans readily accepted the image of the Irish as
irresponsible, flawed individuals. This stereotyped portrait had been
portrayed on the British popular stage for a century.Native
born Americans, to a great extent, prided themselves on their British
ancestry and their liberal Protestantism. They believed - as many
British did - that Irish poverty was a sign of laziness and immorality,
of ignorance and superstition; traits they considered inseparable from
Irishness and Catholicism. Irish men and women were depicted in
newspapers and in popular caricatures in magazines such as Harpers and
Judge as apelike, sub-human and anarchic.This
attitude gained further credibility from interpretations based on
Darwinian research, that some cultures and some societies were
inherently less evolved than others and therefore inferior. Ironically
while presenting a heartfelt and enduring reaction to the anti Irish
bigotry of the day, “No Irish Need Apply “ contains the stereotype of
the Irish as pugilists and employs the stage Irish patios, which was
often used in public to ridicule the Irish.

Comments that
follow are from the ending paragraph of a long essay by Richard Jensen
who contends there were never any “No Irish Need Apply”
signs, that they were a figment of the Irish community's imagination.
"In conclusion, the Irish are especially important for having risen from
the bottom to the top of the ladder over a period of a century and a
half. Was it in the face of intense hostility, symbolized by the
omnipresent sign, "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply?”

They themselves
believed the sign appeared on shops and factories in every large city,
forcing them downward into the worst jobs, and represented deliberate
humiliation by arrogant Protestant Yankees. But what if there were no
such signs? The "No Irish" slogan came from John Poole's enormously
popular Irish-American song that originated about 1862. The song and
slogan had the effect of reinforcing political solidarity. It also
strengthened the work gang outlook of Irish workers who tried to stick
together at all times.It warned the Irish
against looking for jobs outside their community, and it explained their
low upward social mobility. Relatively few moved up the occupational
ladder even as the American economy grew explosively. The slogan
identified an enemy to blame, and justified bully behavior on the city
streets. Irish history is an American success story, and they no longer
need myths about No Irish Need Apply."http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm

Song #10 Me Uncle Dan McCann

I first heard
this delightful song on a 78 rpm recording made in the late 1920s by
CountyWicklow
born singer and Uillean Piper, Shaun O'Nolan.Nolan
was a good traditional musician but at heart he was a vaudevillian who
sang in a hearty rough country style with a minimum of finesse but
plenty of theatrical enthusiasm.The late Waterford
banjo player, Mike Flanagan, of the famous Flanagan Brothers also knew
the song and told me it was very popular in the 1920s and 30s in New York.
The song combines a good-humored joviality with a sense of pride in the
extraordinary social and political accomplishments of the post-famine
immigrant Irish.Beginning in the 1860s, the Irish
began to exert a remarkable effect in American political life gaining
power predominantly as members of the Democratic Party political
machines in the large urban areas particularly in cities such as Boston,
Chicago
and New York.
Preparing them for their meteoric rise to power in American urban
politics was the experience they had gained in political organizing back
in Ireland
in the years before the famine.From the 1820s on
they had learned first hand about the effectiveness of grassroots
political organization through involve-ment in the Catholic Emancipation
movement led by Daniel O'Connell. They had learned over and over again
the hard lesson of achieving political gains under a repressive regime
that denied them fundamental civil rights such as the right to vote and
own property.In their fight against colonialism
they had learned how to operate successfully outside conventional legal
and political machinery.This acumen was to prove
invaluable in dealing with the fluid world of American urban politics
where the rules had yet to be written. Their
political style was based on the notion of hierarchical reciprocity
which dominated social relationships in the rural Ireland
they had come from -- basically that of favors given and received and
favors due.The story of Uncle Dan McCan's life in
America
and his continuing affection for Ireland
represented the pinnacle of the Irish achievement in 19th century
American politics.

Song #11 Paddy Works on
the Railway

Different
variants of "Paddy Works on the Railway" appear widely in broadsides in
America
between 1850 and 1880, though it is likely that the first versions of
the song were imported from England.This is a collated version which includes a tag at the end that I
first heard sung by Luke Kelly of the Dubliners in the 1960s.
The treble strike of the pick ax and the bass
rumble of rock, soil and earth being blasted out and hauled away to
create canals or lay railroad track is brought to mind by many similar
songs written in mid-1880s when the sounds, sights, sweat and toil of
huge construction projects - like the Transcontinental Railroad - filled
the long days of millions of Irish migrant workers new to this country.
Men, who left Ireland
impoverished, provided much of the raw manpower needed to lay and link
the web of iron and water that eventually criss-crossed this wide
continent.Indeed Irish immigrant labor was largely
responsible for building the infrastructure that the United States
needed to become a highly profitable industrial power in the 1800s.The toll taken on the lives of these immigrants was enormous and
the loss of life incalculable. The average life span of an Irish canal
or railroad worker was around seven years as disease, alcoholism and
violence ran rampant in the hovels of the shanty towns that sprang up
the path of the railroads.

Song #12 The Mulligan Guard

This was one of
the most famous songs written by popular dramatist, Ed Harrigan, often
described as "the Dickens of America." Born in 1844 in a heavily Irish
community on Manhattan's
East Side,
Harrigan witnessed first-hand the daily drama in New York's
patchwork of ghettos, where a multitude of ethnic groups lived
side-by-side.Harrigan portrayed the urban America
he knew in a tremendous career that combined writing, acting in, and
producing plays and songs.As a twenty-seven year
old actor and singer, Harrigan teamed up with a young Irish American
singer and dancer named Anthony Cannon, who soon changed his name to
Tony Hart.Harrigan and Hart became the most
celebrated duo of the 1870s and 80s.In their own
Theater Comique on Broadway they produced scores of hugely successful
musicals.Both Harrigan and Hart were great stage
performers but Harrigan was the one who wrote the plays. He produced
over thirty-six in all, and created more than eighty shorter sketches.
He also wrote lyrics for the many songs that filled these plays while
the melodies were composed by this musical collaborator and father in
law, David Braham.The many plays and songs
that Harrigan wrote about lower class life in city slums represented a
unique window into immigrant Irish urban culture.
This was hardly surprising given that in his heyday in the 1870s one out
of every two inhabitants of Manhattan
was Irish born. The themes of his plays dwelt on the social issues of
the day including jobs, occupa-tions, recruiting, ward politics and
voting. Also of confidence men and other types of criminals, language
prob-lems of immigrants, tenement housing, and landlord-tenant disputes.
Some of Harrigan and Hart's most popular characters appeared in a series
of plays about, "The Mulligan Guard" -a mythical Irish-American target
company of the day headed by Dan Mulligan, a man of enormous integrity
who resisted pressures to assimilate and abandon his working class Irish
American identity.Target companies emerged after
the Civil War and were often fraternal, ethnic and exclusionary in
membership. They organized shooting expeditions and got together for
regular week-end picnics, where the rivalry between different companies
adorned in elaborate uniforms often erupted into brawls. All this was
commented upon and satirized in the Mulligan Guard productions which
paraded scores of Irish American characters across the stage to the
delight of audiences everywhere. This, the theme song of the series, was
one of the most popular hits of the day, sung on every street corner and
in every saloon.

Song
#13 Maloney The Rolling Mill Man

Positive images
of the Irish as hard working decent Americans, the kind of people one
would be delighted to have as friends and neighbors, abounded in
American popular songs in the late 1800s.This song,
proclaiming the virtues of an upstanding Irish American was written by
John Walter Kelly who grew up in an Irish family working in the steel
mills around Pittsburgh
in the 1880s. He graduated to the position of rolling mill man, an
occupation which represented the aristocracy of the profession
[eventually the job was suddenly eliminated by mechanization]. Happily
unemployed he headed to Chicago
and realized his life long dream which was to become a vaudevillian.He established his own theater on State Street
in North Chicago
and wrote some of the most popular songs of the 1890s.Among them were "Slide Kelly Slide," which was a big hit among
baseball fans, and "Throw Him Down McCluskey" about a savage fistfight
between two Irishman. This became a huge hit in New York
where it was performed on the vaudeville stage by the colorful Maggie
Cline, who would get stage hands and audience members alike to make
banging noises as she thundered out the chorus.He
also wrote "The Great Milwaukee Fire" about the tragic death of scores
of young women in a boarding house fire.Many of the
women who died were from CountyLimerick,
staying in cheap lodgings on their way to work as dairymaids in Wisconsin.
And another one of his big successes was "Maloney the Rolling Mill Man"
no doubt modeled humorously after himself.
Especially in American urban settings, the local parish and Catholic
Church became the center of Irish community life and involvement in
church activities conveyed a prime measure of respectability.The fact that Maloney was the one chosen to take up the
collection at Sunday mass attests, of course, to the unimpeachability of
his character.

Song #14Clancy's Wooden Wedding

This
prototypical stage Irish song was a favorite of the noted New York
singer and comedian, James Porter, who first recorded it in 1910.It is a classic example of the 19th century "Irish fight" song
which commonly presented the Irish as fun loving, good natured but
frequently intoxicated pugilists.All the songs in
this vein basically had the same structure.A party
would be arranged.The occasion might be a wedding,
wake, birthday, christening or anniversary - in this case the 5th
anniversary of the wedding of Pat Clancy.Typically
the guests arriving would be introduced with a litany of Irish names.
Festivities would begin with an abundance of food and drink. Then a
verbal repartee would escalate into a fight.It
would begin with fisticuffs and then shillelaghs and other weapons would
be produced which might include chair legs or other objects rescued from
the debris.Murder and mayhem would ensue with
broken heads and sometimes corpses all around. The police would arrive
and sometimes they too became involved in the melee.
They would arrest the participants and frequently the song would
conclude with a description of the ensuing court case and the sentencing
of the pugilists.By the time "The Wooden
Wedding" became popular most Irish American singers would have performed
this kind of song very much tongue-in-cheek from a secure vantage point
on the now elevated position on the American social ladder.

Song # 15The Kellys

This jovial
song was extremely popular among Irish American audiences in the early
20th century, judging by the number of performers who recorded 78 rpm
versions of it including Shaun O'Nolan and the McNulty family. But the
time the song was current the Irish had made a major transition from low
status immigrant work to a wide range of occupations in urban America,
a phenomenon they celebrated in their songs. As in any large immigrant
group, there were Irish Americans, of course, who still worked on the
low end of the pay scale as laborers and domestic help.Now, however, more highly skilled and educated second-and
third-generation Irish Americans enjoyed greatly increased
opportunities, filling a wide variety of occupations. They
worked in construction, factories, and ware-houses. They
formed and entered religious orders as priests and nuns.They
became clerks, educators, labor leaders, teachers, nurses, policemen,
firemen, shopkeepers, sportsmen, entertainers and politicians. By the
turn of the century, so accepted were the Irish in America
that few avenues in society were closed to them. The
popular culture reflected these changed circumstances portraying Irish
men and women in a new, favorable light.

Song #16Sweet King Williamstown

This song was
written in the early 1900s by Daniel Buckley, a native of King
Williamstown in the Sliabh Luachra area of CountyCork,
now known more by its original name of Ballydesmond.
Buckley was a "character" with a precocious talent for singing and song
writing, well known and liked in the locality. He decided to emigrate to
the United states
in 1912, at the age of 22, along with his 16 year old cousin Nora
O'Leary who had received an offer to work as a domestic in New York.The ship they sailed on out of QueenstownHarbor
was none other than the Titanic.When the ship
struck the iceberg Danny Buckley was among those who led the charge from
steerage to first class, breaking down the dividing doors in the
process.He made it onto a lifeboat but, when
officers with revolvers came to order all the men out of boats, Danny's
nerve broke.As he lay cowering in the corner of a
lifeboat, trying to hide, one of the female lifeboat passengers took
pity on him and threw her shawl over him.Thus
disguised as a woman, he managed to escape detection and was among those
who made it safely to New York.
The whole story came out during a U.S. Senate hearing on the tragedy
when he was forced to appear and tell of his experiences.

Indeed there
was hardly ever a more reluctant witness subpoenaed to appear before
that august body!Afterwards he was known
disparagingly among the New York Irish as "Danny Buckley the girl."Probably motivated by a desire to prove his manhood, he enlisted
in the American army in World War I. He was transferred overseas in 1918
and in the last week of the war was the last American solder to be
killed -- ironically while helping wounded fellow soldiers escape the
battlefields of France."Sweet King Williamstown," his most famous composition, is still
sung to the day in his native Ballydesmond where he is buried in the
local cemetery right beside his cousin Nora.

Song #17Daisy Bell

I first heard
this song on a 1930s 78 rpm recording of the famed McNulty Family who
were the most famous Irish performing song and dance group in the Eastern United States
between 1930 and the late 1950s. It uses the
popularity of the well known popular 1890s song of the same name to
comment ironically on the changing shape of ethnicity among Irish
Americans in the early years of the 20th century. This was a time of
great transition in Irish American urban culture as young people, the
sons and daughters of immigrants choose to broaden their cultural
perspectives and strike out beyond the comfortable boundaries of the
ethnic community.Unlike their forbears in post
famine rural Ireland,
young Irish Americans in the first quarter of the twentieth century
could defiantly assert their right to choose their own partners in
romance and marriage, and they did so.Future
generations of Irish Americans would not only choose their husbands and
wives from their own community, but look out into the multi-ethnic
American population to find their partners, people with faces and
cultures very different from their own. Pete McNulty's parody of the
popular turn of the century hit, "Daisy Bell," foresees this seismic
change in the immigrant culture in gentle, good humored fashion.